COBie inventor says Archicad is 100% COBie-compliant

February 16, 2016

BUDAPEST, February 16, 2016 – The inventor of COBie, Bill East, has been working with Rob Jackson, Associate Director of Bond Bryan Architects, to simulate the early design in Archicad of one of four dormitories on a fictitious site adjacent to the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois. The goal is to create a reference COBie test project.

Bill East – inventor of COBie
As the design developed, the COBie Plugin for BIMserver.org was iteratively applied to resolve identified issues. In some cases, these issues were the result of modeling. Other issues required direct feedback with Archicad programmers. This communication was extremely helpful, efficient, and resulted in several software change tickets for which work-arounds were applied for this project. According to East, “The results of this experiment demonstrated 100% compliance with Archicad against NBIMS-US V3, Design Stage COBie requirements.”
To show how 100% COBie compliance was achieved, East and Jackson are currently finishing a book that provides step-by-step instructions. The book is expected to be published in 2016. Following that, the two are looking to move beyond COBie at Early Design by engaging an MEP firm to help them develop and merge COBie-compliant HVAC, plumbing, and electrical designs.

For more information about the COBie reference test project, please visit http://prairieskyconsulting.com/testing.htm
For the “COBie Guide” to the various Archicad versions, please visit https://www.graphisoft.com/downloads/addons/ifc/index.html

About Bill East

E. William (Bill) East is an innovator whose career spans the areas of planning and scheduling, quality management, and building information modeling. In 2007, East invented the Construction-Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie). COBie is an international standard that squeezes profits from an otherwise wasteful construction handover process. East is currently Owner, Prairie Sky Consulting, where he helps owners and contractors specify and meet COBie requirements.